Railroad Tracks to Nowhere
If you are not a new reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I have a fondness for railroad related items. Raleigh has a rich history with railroading, and it shows in some of the artifacts around town.
I can’t say that I know the purpose of this dilapidated structure. My guess is that it was a direct route in to the warehouse to the last building on West Martin St..
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04/17/2008
Hi John,
What you have stumbled upon here is the remains of an overshot loading system for the coal yard that occupied this site ca. 1910s-1980s(i.e. Smith Coal and Oil; preceded by Merritt Coal Co.) The coal trains would back their cars in from the main track and position them above the bins located below the trestle. Coal was graded according to its intended use (e.g. stoves, fireplace or furnace, etc.) and the particular grade was released into the bin. From there it was shoveled onto delivery trucks. There also used to be 2 enormous vertical fuel oil tanks on the site.
ps– I see that you also found the old train turntable near Peace St downtown. There used to be a superstructure surrounding it. Have you see the 19th century stone trestle support under the tracks at Crabtree Creek? It’s off Hodges St between Atlantic Av. and Wake Forest Rd.
09/06/2009
Norwood Smith used to man the coal yard when I was an undergraduate at NCSU. I lived in two different houses with coal grates in the fireplaces in college (one on Maiden Lane….Directly across the street from the NCSU belltower and at 122 N. Boylan Avenue (otherwise know as the COC House for Corrosion of Conformity….The band). Mr. Smith would sell us 50lb. bags of coal for $10 and we would have some serious fires at the Maiden Lane and Boylan Ave. houses. Environmentally, this was not a good thing to do but the heat bill was ridiculous at the Boylan House (and firewood was expensive), so we burned coal. The coal yard closed a few years later.